Should have mentioned fully charged Sunday night and brought it out fishing again today. 4 hours of run time has left me with 3% battery and yes the external battery was charging internal battery for about 2-2.5 hours. Great idea but I don’t think enough testing. Getting 12 hours of run time shouldn’t be an issue
Not enough testing? MarCum knows exactly what they’ve sold you. I have a friend that manages a fishing department at a retail store and I asked him why the RT9 wasn’t being offered at retail. Rapala is the company that markets and distributes all other MarCum sonar products but they won’t touch the RT9 with a 10-foot pole and they’ve refused to sell it to their retailers! They know what a POS the RT9 is and they’re not willing to put their name behind the product.
So what does Marcum do? They come up with a sneaky plan to sell factory direct and take advantage of people that trust MarCum’s products. The RT9 has major run-time issues that have never been resolved. The user interface is horrible. Durability is horrible. You will have your RT9 in for repairs if you can actually find a way to keep it powered out on the ice. How do I know? I was dumb enough to buy one when the product was first released several years ago. I had nothing but issues.
I paid nearly $1500 for mine at the time. I can’t tell you how mad it makes me to see MarCum discounting the RT9 to move them when I paid full price and they left me out to dry when I was having so many issue. MarCum is throwing in a Camera Panner to sweeten the deal which is another MarCum product that lasted one season because it was another POS. Don’t fall for this factory direct deal!!!!! Ask yourself why none of the bigger name pro staff guys are using it.
Save yourself a gigantic headache and a pile of money and buy yourself a LX7 and use your cell phone for GPS. Or buy TWO Humminbirds that work flawlessly for the same price as one RT9 with all its issues. I’ve run Marcum units for a long time and never had any issues until I had an RT9. I’m not trying to bash a product more I’m just trying to save fellow ice anglers from wasting their time and money on this horrible product. I don’t know how long this post will last but if you can please share this info with people that are thinking about buying an RT9.